Chapter Text
Adam was a bit of a mythical figure in their white-bread, upper-middle class suburban small town. Why wouldn't he be, considering he was the antithesis to all their values, or as the boy himself would call it - "cultural rape indoctrination". In contrast to khaki shorts and crisp t-shirts he wore long, baggy cargo pants, XXXL polos despite weighing 116 lbs., and nondescript hoodies.
For as long as anyone could remember seeing him there, he interacted with noone; if a crowd started to form around his playing, he would quickly become flustered, eyes wide and full of a wild sort of anxiety and unease that could only be descried as how a chimpanzee looks at you straight in the eyes before it rips your face off in a bloody rampage. But there was something also enchanting about his visage, something you couldn't walk away from, like watching a car crash in slow-mo, replaying it constantly.
That's how he thought about the boy, anyway.
(and just like that car crash, oh he'd be the death of him, alright)
At an even 6'0', tall and gangly full of sharp points and angles sticking out of a too-thin body, he was like a ghoul haunting the local AMC Danbury to follow his same rigid routine; he was a spirit forever trapped in limbo. His pale skin was painted by the blinking greebles and lights of the arcade cabinet as he hopped around like a hamster on speed.
If one looked closed enough in that bright light that constantly surrounded him, they could see deep blue veins and scaly red excoriated marks just hiding under the milky white surface, a sign of the already obviousness disturbance of this young man's mind. Nobody knew much about the boy; so high school and middle school kids who frequented started to make up rumors about him, ranging from the absurd (he's a wanted criminal that escaped a mental institution and killed his entire family) to funny (he's the result of MK Ultra experiments on arcade games).
Adults just tended to stop and stare, shaking their heads in muddled disbelief.
Many were afraid of him, others just ignored him. But through those two groups another emerged. One could call it a sort of fan club.
And through this "fan club", he sought out to find as much as he could about this strange character that had permanently changed this otherwise painfully ordinary existence of small town Connecticut
(in more ways than one, he would soon find out).
From what started as a simple curiosity started to grow into an obsession. The fan club had moved onto other things, but he never did. His friends joked about how he was "gay" for "Adam fucking Lanza".
(He wasn't. He knew he wasn't.)
His life ended and began with one video tape. For weeks, months, how long exactly he had forgotten at this point, he had been secretly recording Adam as he played.
He had almost been caught a few times before, but somehow before this one, he always got away with it.
But then, as his shaking hands reached to turn the camcorder's dial to OFF, from the corners of his peripheral vision, he spotted a lumbering figure shadow him, gait stiff and unnatural. He knew who it was before the synapses in his amygdala could fire off and reach into his memory and tell him that it was Lanza.
He stumbled over an innocent façade, rapid-firing off "uhm"s and awkward, breathy chuckles. He felt his heart shoot up into his throat when the boy's excoriated, bony fingers pressed down on the video screen, making a distinct click as it folded into the device. As he instinctively looked up to meet Lanza's gaze, he had that "chimpanzee-about-to-maul-you" look in his wide eyes, and he braced himself for an assault that never came. It was silent for a moment, both boys too unsure of what to say, if anything.
"You're pretty good at that - that game, huh?" Lanza's lips, which seemed to permanently fold into themselves in a shocked, stupefied expression, almost curled up into a smile. Almost.
"I suppose you could say that. But what is good, really?" And from that moment on, the boy both wished he had said nothing and walked away, treated him as everyone else had done before - but he also felt elated that Lanza had spoken to him, and him alone.
This would be the start of a very strange relationship.
So far, he knew four things about the boy.
* He did not like to be touched.
* He hated loud sounds and bright lights, yet played DDR (a game that contains exactly those things) 10 hours a day, every day.
* He was a clean freak; his hands excoriated and shiny like a welt told him that first description might be an understatement.
* He did not like any one to enter his room, not even his own mother.
He learned this mostly from observation, of course. He couldn't really consider Lanza much of a friend, but he wasn't exactly as unknown as an acquaintance. Hell, he had to admit, it was a bit hard to even spend a modicum of time with the young man without feeling this sort of weird sinking, dark feeling inside his stomach; it was like something terrible was about to happen because of Adam but his body or his brain couldn't exactly articulate what it was. But still, he followed Adam on his routine, he was always there with his camcorder - a muse and his painter.
Sometimes, they had what could be called conversations. If one person listening to another ramble on and on about society and culture and rape and therapists (the boy had a weird fixation with rapist therapists especially) while slowly wondering if they should dial the nearest psych ward is a conversation.
But there were some moments where Adam started to make sense. Either that, or he was getting sucked into Adam's sick, dark world. But, hey, maybe that might be okay. It was certainly better than being lonely - you know what they say about comfort in darkness.
"I wish I was born a chimp." Was the starting phrase of one of his late-night e-mails that awoke him from his sleep-deprived slumber; at this point, most of their communications were online - Lanza himself he had said the only person who had ever been inside his house on Yogananda Street aside from him and his mother had been a visit from his estranged father. Apparently that last meeting had been so fucked up, so horrible, that he'd never let anyone else in since.
Oh, back to the e-mail. Adam had also talked a lot about monkeys and chimps and protoneanderthal societies, as much as he talked about culturapists.
"i still don't get it dude" He typed in a dreary, sleep-munted stupor, eyes still adjusting to the fluorescein screen of his monitor. "why would you want to be a fucking monkey when you have the INTERNET"
"and DDR"
And he waited for an agonizing five minutes of silence before the notification bleeped.
"Chimpanzees and monkeys are two entirely different species el oh el." Of course he had to be a smartass.
After that bout of humor, it didn't take long for Adam to get to his third favorite subject; suicide.
"Nancy keeps saying I cannot live my dream of being in the military because of my condition. I don't care about my "condition" I am sick of culture insisting I am sick." He could imagine the boy's eyes wide, bloodshot. The beginnings of tears forming. He had never seen Lanza cry before, though, he wondered if he could even feel true sadness.
"hey maybe you can convince her, like you could go back to college" He knew Adam wouldn't listen.
"I'm not going back. I can do it myself." Lanza knew he was fooling himself. Even without his eccentricities and troubles, he still was incredibly sheltered from the real world - sheltered from the cruel reality of war and death and hurt. For so much as he talked about the disgusting and absurd, he had no true idea of what it looked like. He lived in the nicest house in the street, never had to lift a finger because mommy dearest would do it for him.
But still, there was something missing. Something satantic and bubbling black peering beyond the cracks in the drywall like that scene in the Amityville Horror.
Fuck, he realized at this moment how poetic Adam's existence was. A pile of neuroticizes and failed parenting trapped in a beautiful cage. He wondered if this caged bird do sing? If he was an experienced filmmaker, this would be his perfect thesis. "Maybe I should just splatter my dreams on the walls already, ha ha." And the reality hits.
He didn't want to deal with this right now. He closed the e-mail application and pressed the power button. He needed sleep.
But he found himself, staying awake, mind racing.
Wondering if Adam was okay. He realized he'd never felt such deep concern for anyone else like this before. Why him, he thought, eyes glancing back to the black screen, Out of all people to make me feel something, did it have to be Adam. The DDR boy. The freak.